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Web Slice Format Specification - Version 0.9

Web Slice Format Specification - Version 0.9 New for Windows Internet Explorer 8

A Web Slice allows users to subscribe to a portion of a Web page. The Web Slice format consists of the minimum HTML annotations necessary to enable the publication and consumption of a mutable item on a Web page. Web publishers can use this format in conjunction with properties from hAtom Microformat World Wide Web link to make portions of a Web page subscribe-able.

This document explains the Web Slice format.

Web Slice Example

The following example shows how a Web Slice is defined on a Web page for an auction.

Copy 

<div class="hslice" id="slice1">
   <p class="entry-title">Game System - $66.00</p>
   <div class="entry-content">
      <img src="game.jpg">
      <p>Auction ends: <abbr class="endtime" title="2008-02-28T12:00:00-05:00">6 hours</abbr></p>
   </div>
   <a rel="feedurl" href="www.ebay.com/game.xml">Subscribe to Feed</a>
   <p>This item updates every <span class="ttl">15</span> minutes.</p>
</div>

Basic Properties

The basic properties of a Web Slice are the Web Slice container, Entry Title, and Entry Content.

Web Slice

  • Required
  • Uses the class name hslice
  • Must include an id
  • Represents the entire region of the Web Slice that contains the title, description, and other Web Slice properties

Entry Title

Entry Content

  • Optional
  • Uses the class name entry-content as defined in the hAtom Microformat

Expiration Property

The Expiration property is used to indicate when an item is no longer active. For example, an auction item ends tomorrow or a flight arrives at 7:00 P.M. today.

End Time

Alternative Properties

These properties are used to specify different sources for display and navigation.

Alternative Display Source

  • Optional
  • Uses the rel name entry-content
  • Indicates the Web page for the display from the value of the href attribute

Alternative Navigation

  • Optional
  • Uses the rel name bookmark as defined in the hAtom Microformat World Wide Web link
  • Indicates the resource to use for navigation from the value of the href attribute

Bandwidth Properties

Sites can also specify properties to control how Internet Explorer updates a Web Slice.

Time to Live

  • Optional
  • Uses class name ttl
  • Represents the concept of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) 2.0 ttl element
  • Value must be expressed as minutes (integer)

Alternative Update Source

Alternatively, specify a different source from which to get updates.

  • Optional
  • Uses the rel name feedurl
  • The href attribute indicates the Web Slice or feed from which to get updates

Licensing Information

Microsoft's copyrights in this specification are dedicated to the public domain under the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication. To view a copy of this dedication, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain World Wide Web link. There is a separate patent promise called the Microsoft Open Specification Promise, available to parties interested in implementing software that conforms to this specification. This patent promise is available at http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx.

Revisions

Version 0.9

Version 0.8

  • First release

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bul7oor
always judge with the first impression
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How is authentication supposed to be handled, currently it does not work at all
Since this uses the RSS agent, not IE8, authentication fails.

I can't see how slices will be used (other than a basic test case) without requiring a working authentication model.

[jsudds.MSFT] Be sure to check out the new overview on this topic: Authenticated Web Slices.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd565670(VS.85).aspx
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ID attribute in example is invalid
Currently the container div element in the example has the value "1" for it's ID attribute. This is invalid according to the SGML and (x)HTML spec.
ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods (".").

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#h-6.2

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ISO date in title attribute presents accessibility problems
Use of abbr-design-pattern to encode the datetime is controversial because of accessibility issues (the ISO date in the title is human-unfriendly, and may be read aloud by some screen readers in place of the visible content; also, in the presence of an end date but absence of an end time, the first minute of the day is used rather than the last). That one issue is sufficient for me to disqualify using this format for any visible content on our website. (We do plan to use it for hidden content, however.)

Hope this helps,

Charles Belov

SFMTA Webmaster

http://www.sfmta.com/webmaster


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Can Feedurl be used to edit current link?

Thanks for this great article on making Webslices.

I'm currently using webslices on one of my sites I designed, and I was looking for a way to give people the ability to uses slices on my pages, without having the issue that my counters think that every time when Internet Explorer 'pings' the system thinks it's a new visitor.

For example, on of the websites is: Tenneessee Podcasts. Like you can see, the first podcast is changed into a webslice div. When you cilck the purple box that IE8 adds, you now see that it tells the feedurl is ?webslice=true

Now I made my system this way, when the webpage opens with ?webslice=true in it's url, will not be counted as a visitor.

Is this a valid way to use Webslices, or is there a risk that my slice will have issues or problems in later builds?

Thanks,


Peter

[jsudds.MSFT] Yes, this approach works great. Alternatively, you could detect the RSS User Agent String (RSS Platform/2.0) which is only sent when the feedsync engine is making a request. Although there are cases where IE itself does the download, in which case your approach is better.


[jsudds.MSFT] PS: Don't forget that you can also use an alternative update source (feedurl property) to redirect traffic away from your home page.

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